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Weak VIII

20 February 2025

No. 1,301 (cartoon)

I’m afraid of falling in love.

Don’t worry; that’s never hurt anyone.

It’s the landing that scares me.

21 February 2025

Mel Bochner

Dang; what is it with all these obituaries? I know everyone’s gotta die, but sheesh! Couldn’t the people of interest to me work out some sort of schedule, something like one checking out every other month or so?

I just spotted the headline, Mel Bochner, Conceptual Artist Who Played With Language, Dies at 84. Mel who? I’m the slightest bit embarrassed to report I’d never heard of him before even though he was one of the first pioneers of conceptual art—if not one of the founders—with pieces like Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art.

Not much news gets into my bubble; I’ve been plagiarizing him for decades without ever hearing his name. [Note to self: change “plagiarizing” to something like “my work has been informed by his.”]

Bochner and Ed Ruscha have made hundreds of paintings featuring words, but I’m not going to waste my time looking at who did what when; I’ll leave that pointless exercise to the art historians, poor buggers. “Who’s on First” never worked for anyone except Abbott and Costello, and later, The Credibility Gap.

22 February 2025

A Nice Little Photograph of a Nice Little Painting

Annie and I were walking around Chinatown when she suggested we pop by the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. After I pooh-poohed the idea of visiting a tourist trap, she strongly suggested that we visit “a San Francisco institution that’s been around since 1962.” I replied that the advertising line didn’t mean anything, so she ended the discussion by demanding that we go there.

I whined about the long line of customers we spotted snaking down Ross Alley, but Annie gave my bad act a bad review.

“Get down off your high horse,” she admonished, “and you might just see something.”

It pains me to admit it, but I’ll be darned if she wasn’t right. I walked down the alley and spotted a diminutive little painting of a cat and mouse in profile. I appreciated that it was presented at the eye level of a passing pussycat. It looked like something Banksy might have done, except that it seemed apolitical—I think he might have used a rat instead of a mouse—and, most importantly, no one had chiseled it out of the wall.

Annie showed up with her bag of treats just as I was getting off my knees from making a nice little photograph of the nice little painting. She was satisfied with her overpriced cookies, and I was pleased that I had something to publish for the day.

Win-win as the Californians say. And that will have to do for a happy ending.

23 February 2025

Lucas Samaras and Onanism

Sometimes it takes rather a long time for news from the outside world to reach my brain. And so it is that I just heard that Lucas Samaras popped his clogs ... a year ago. I stopped reading when I got to this sentence: “He was a self-described onanist.”

What the dickens is an onanist? My crappy dictionary has two definitions: “masturbation” and “coitus interruptus.” Useless, feh.

My definitive dictionary wasn’t at all helpful either. When I looked for a clear definition; I got a biblical reference ...

[f. proper name Onan (Gen. xxxviii. 9)]

... and a dictionary definition from three hundred years ago: 1727–41 Chambers Cycl., Onania, and Onanism, terms which some late empirics have framed, to denote the crime of self-pollution.

The crime of self-pollution?!

Onanism, whatever that is, is irrelevant to Samaras’s work. It speaks for itself, and that’s all that matters to me. And that’s quite fortunate given the gibberish I got from my dictionaries.

24 February 2025

Spring Valley Science Elementary School Suicide Prevention Nets

When it comes to new technology, the social scientists get to work after the physical engineers have completed the first iteration. San Francisco is full of driverless taxis that provide a convenient and relatively inexpensive alternative to hotels for sex. The developers apparently never anticipated that, but everyone else did.

And then there are the four-hundred-million dollar Golden Gate Bridge suicide barriers. Now, when you jump off the bridge, you land in a net.

Brilliant! Or not.

As an unforeseen result, suicidal people are jumping from other places, including the Spring Valley Science Elementary School, the oldest public school in California. It’s not that tall, but if the first try doesn’t succeed you can always crawl back to the third floor and perfect your technique over repeated attempts.

Or, more accurately, you used to be able to do that, but now the school has also installed suicide prevention nets around the perimeter of the building. The webbing is fairly narrow, but how far can a seven-year-old kid jump? And anyway, fish gonna fry, jumpers gonna jump, whatcha gonna do?

25 February 2025

Plastic Water Bottle Preserved in Asphalt c. 2024

I recently wrote about the Rispin Drive paving project on 23 September and 8 October 2024, and I’m doing so again today after seeing a recent development there. This gives me great personal satisfaction: I figure I’ll always be entertained if all it takes is a plastic bottle and some asphalt to put a smile on my mug.

I’m talking about the discarded water bottle that sloppy workers left on the unpaved roadway. I discovered their lackadaisical approach to quality control when the crumbling pavement revealed the crushed bottle. It’s not anything like the La Brea Tar Pits, but it certainly ain’t bad for Oakland.

On a rare technological note, I included a Geographic Society of America photo scale/focus guide to make Plastic Water Bottle Preserved in Asphalt c. 2024 look a bit more sciencey if not altogether convincingly scientifical. Pixel-peepers will note that I sabotaged that effect by ignoring the instructions, “Fine-focus on GSA seal.” I thought the focus on the bottle was fine enough for me, so I declared the little project complete without reshooting it.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2025 David Glenn Rinehart